While Bishop Egan denies Tomas permission to perform the exorcism on Angela's daughter, Father Marcus breaks out of Saint Aquinas and joins forces with Tomas, though he urges him to get his ex, Jessica, out of his life and heart. The Rance family's relationship with the demon deepens and when Marcus catches Angela stealing holy water, he instructs her on how to use it. On Chicago's South Side, a series of bizarre ritual killings begin taking place.

Ed Gonzalez

Tom Long

The young skeptical priest and older exorcist priest will team up to do battle with the devil while Davis looks on wide-eyed, apparently, and this will be dragged out on a weekly basis. Heaven help us.

Matt Zoller Seitz

The David Fincher–style neon-dumpster color scheme, multilayered sound design, and crackerjack supporting performances (including Alan Ruck as Davis’s deeply damaged husband) make it worth a look, though whether the power of Christ will compel repeated viewings remains to be seen.

Ellen Gray

Herrera, Davis, and Ruck are all good enough to make me want to see more, but there have been so many decades of demons since the original movie made heads spin, that the evil--or at least its special-effects-assisted manifestation--feels a little tired.

Tim Grierson

Charlie Mason

Jeff Jensen

Rupert Wyatt’s direction is solid, but he’s too beholden to the visual grammar of his inspiration, and the familiarity dilutes the fear factor. It looks frightening, but it doesn’t chill--the images are cliché, the jump scares barely provoke a jitter.

Robert Rorke

Tim Goodman

If you're the kind of person who likes scary shows and mythology, it might be fair to give The Exorcist a chance for a few episodes to see what it has planned. Both Daniels and Herrera are charismatic, and if the writers can make the God vs. the devil face-off grow beyond the Rance household, there might be a show here that's worth a few scares.

Robert Bianco

Ben Travers

Though the first hour dutifully pays homage to the scariest movie of all time--especially in its studiously lit opening moments--and even branches out with key changes meant to elongate the story, the pilot fails to pay off in one major way: It’s not very scary.

Robert Lloyd

Hank Stuever

No one’s outdone William Friedkin’s 1973 masterful movie adaptation of William Peter Blatty’s novel about the pernicious demon who sent a man of the cloth tumbling down the Georgetown steps. Fox’s new series based on the movie isn’t intent on outdoing the classic so much as borrowing its frigid style, which it gets essentially correct in the first episode.

David Wiegand

The TV version can’t quite go that far, at least not on a broadcast channel, but the special effects are convincing, and the script is a labyrinth of mystery and suspicion guaranteed to hold your interest.

Vicki Hyman

The expensive-looking pilot episode, with its frequent use of unusual camera angles to suggest a world gone askew, effectively establishes the sinister vibe, with some genuine scares and plenty of gore. Daniels is particularly magnetic as the older, put-out-to-pasture priest haunted in more ways than one.

Glenn Garvin

The most interesting thing of all about The Exorcist is that it shares the hardball theology of Fox's Lucifer, AMC's Preacher and Cinemax's exorcism show Outcast. One renegade priest in The Exorcist even resolves his doctrinal disputes with Rome not with an encyclical but a .38. It seems television's era of amiable pseudo-Unitarian clergymen of the Touched by an Angel and Highway to Heaven stripe is officially dead.

Ed Bark

Maureen Ryan

The first installment of the drama does a truly impressive job of establishing a mournful atmosphere, as it sketches out an array of characters worth following on what promises to be a very challenging journey.

Neil Genzlinger

It doesn’t try to be the movie or outdo it in terms of fright factor, nor does it provide any reasons for mockery. It’s well-made, well-acted television, which is more than can be said for some of the reboots rolling out this fall.

Ken Tucker

Rob Lowman

Judging by the first episode, The Exorcist works as both a tribute to the original as well as on its own terms. There is something of a family drama inside the scares, which gives the idea of making a series out of it more staying power.